Jane at Four Years Old

Jane is 4 years old now and her big passion is drawing. She can literally spend hours sitting and drawing things and people and writing letters. Then after drawing, she gets her scissors and cuts, nicely around the figures she was drawing, or sometimes just hundreds of tiny pieces. When she gets tired of cutting the paper, she cuts her own hair, or that of her sisters... I am not too happy about that, but I have decided to learn to live with that, because she obviously gets so much joy out of scissors. I don't want to take that away from her. The hair will grow again :-)

She likes to play with play dough or bread dough. She makes a lot of tiny creatures with them, often snakes, which get into many exciting adventures. She is a very tactile kid, who likes to have something in her hands to twiddle or play with. She enjoys playing with sand and water, and her newest thing on the beach is making very big drawings in the wet sand, using a stick and walking around in circles, or drawing long lines.

It might sound like she is a quiet kid, but she actually has quite a lot of very active periods too. She is very physical, and will run, jump, hop and swing for hours on end. She sometimes has so much excess energy, that she just runs circles in the house, around and around and around. Or she climbs on things, jumps off, climb, jump, climb, jump, over and over. If somebody happens to be sitting down there, he is just out of luck, she will jump on him. Not a good thing! She often can't eat without being upside down, on her chair, off her chair, next to her chair, under her chair, on her chair again. She also has a very bouncy period at night, when she gets tired, she doesn't calm down, but gets more and more hyper.

She has been taking gymnastics for about a year now and it is a good fit for her. She loves hanging upside down and doing all the things that they learn to do there, forward and backward rolls and jumping on the trampoline. She has mastered the monkey bars at playground this summer and now when we are at a playground, she does those over and over. She is so proud at herself for being able to do them! At the playground she always climbs on top of the highest things. She is a pretty compulsive climber. I keep hoping that all those activities will tire her out, so that she will fall asleep more easily at night, but somehow they just seem to get her into better shape, so that she needs even less sleep!

She has the same sleep issues that Tim has, although less severe. It is really hard for her to relax enough to go to sleep, although she is able to in the end, if there is a parent there to help her. For Tim, even having a parent wasn't enough, for Jane it is. She falls asleep late though, and then has as hard time getting up in the morning. Which is not an issue if we don't have to go anywhere, but if we have something going on, she is a grouch for the first few hours.

She is a nudist at heart, although it has been getting less so over the last few months. She used to be naked most of the time at home, and now she often actually is dressed! We were figuring she would either outgrow it, or be a very popular teenager :-)

It took her a long time to start talking, we were worried about her for a while. So worried that I contacted the school to have her screened to find out her eligibility for speech therapy. So one of their team came over and tested her. She just sat there and was silent. Very cooperative, did the folding / cutting / drawing things she asked of her, but just looked at them when she tried to get her to talk. So they could not assess her speech and we decided to give it some more time. A few months later she suddenly started talking! Although she still isn't super clear, it is a lot better than it used to be.

Emotionally she is less than stable at the moment. I hope it is just a 4yo issue, she falls apart over the smallest things. I will be glad when that phase passes.

She likes to put a lot of toys in a box of a bag, walk around through the house with them, take them out, play with them for a while and then move to another activity. She always seems to be carrying things and I often find those stacks of toys somewhere in the house, abandoned by her. She balks at the idea of actually cleaning them up instead of abandoning them, we sure have quite a lot of room for improvement there :-) She also is in pretend play, either dressing up, or preparing food and serving it to everybody. It is fun to watch her play and make up things.

She has started to build more elaborate structures in Duplo and lego. And then proceeds to play on them with Duplo people and animals, making up lots of stories. She also likes to sing, and we just have gotten her a recorder. The only thing she does on that is just playing the same note over and over though. And she does it LOUD! :-)